Web Browser Security Revisited (Part 7)

by Deb Shinder

Apple’s browser, Safari, has gained somewhat in popularity thanks to the company’s mobile operating system, iOS. However, it has lagged behind the other popular web browsers in terms of security. Now Apple is playing catch-up.With the latest iteration of Safari that’s included in OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), Flash Player will finally run in a sandbox as it already did on IE, Chrome and Firefox. This improves Safari’s security by protecting malware from being able to write to files or tamper with the data in memory that’s used by other applications. Other potentially harmful plug-ins such as Silverlight, QuickTime, Java and PDFs are also sandboxed, and you can enable some plug-ins to only run on specified trusted sites.